Courses on offer / Gender Studies Centre - Dr. Bényei Tamás | Institute of English and American Studies

Several of my courses have a strong gender component, combining an interest in feminist agenda as well as in the changing conceptions of femininity and masculinity. These courses include "Introduction to Literature and Culture", "Postwar British fiction", "After Oedipus: Crime Fiction and Film", "Contemporary Scottish Fiction and Film", "English Literature at the Turn of the Century" and other courses devoted to contemporary British fiction.
The two courses below are predominantly concerned with gender issues.

FANTASY, MYTH AND FAIRY TALE IN POSTWAR BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS
This seminar is designed as an investigation into women writers’ subversive strategies of rewriting older text, stories and genres. The course will explore the question why so many postwar women writers turn to the themes and motifs of the gothic, the fairy tale and myth, and why various versions of fantasy are so frequently cultivated by women writers. Novels and short stories discussed will include the following: Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop; A. S. Byatt’s Possession; Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit; Michele Roberts’s The Gospel According to Mary Magdalene; Emma Tennant’s The Bad Sister; Marina Warner’s Indigo; and fairy tales by Angela Carter (rewriting of ‘The Beauty and the Beast’ from The Bloody Chamber), A. S. Byatt, Liz Lochhead, Sara Maitland and Jenny Diski.

POSTWAR BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS
This seminar is designed as an introduction to the rich fictional output of post-1945 women writers in Britain. While discussing the individual novels, the course will discuss the various attitudes women writers take vis-a-vis feminism, also looking at the differences between first and second generation feminist fiction. We shall also be concerned with the eay various typically ’feminine’ topics and genres (the novel of manners, the novel of senisibility) are handled and rethought by postwar writers. Novels discussed include Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea, Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Elizabeth Taylor’s A Wreath of Roses, Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, Anita Brookner’s Fraud, Ali Smith’s Hotel World, and Salley Vickers’s Miss Garnet’s Angel.